Jia Qiaojie

Her Story

Qiaojie is the only child of Jia Lian and Wang Xifeng, and for most of the novel she is barely a character. She is an infant in a nurse’s arms, called 大姐儿, “the big girl”, carried through rooms where adults are arguing about money. She has almost no dialogue for a hundred chapters. She matters because of how the book ends, and because the whole moral arithmetic of the novel is settled on her.

Her one early scene is an illness. In Chapter 21 she comes down with smallpox. A room is cleared to make offerings to the pox goddess, fried and spiced food is forbidden in the kitchens, and Jia Lian is moved out of his wife’s bedroom for twelve days. He spends them in the outer study with a servant’s wife. A child’s fever is the occasion of her father’s adultery. That is the register the novel keeps her in for a long time — she is the thing other people’s behaviour happens around.

Grannie Liu, a poor countrywoman whose son-in-law’s grandfather once claimed clan kinship with Lady Wang’s father, comes begging at the Rong house in Chapter 6 and is sent away with twenty taels of silver. She comes back in Chapters 39–42 with the first vegetables of her season, is kept for several days, and is walked round the Prospect Garden as an entertainment for the old lady. In Chapter 41 something very small happens. Grannie Liu’s grandson Ban’er is holding a Buddha’s-hand citron; Xifeng’s daughter is holding a pomelo; the child wants the citron and cries, and the maids swap the two fruits between them. The commentator Zhiyanzhai marked the passage: 小儿常性，遂成千里伏线 — an ordinary childish whim, and it becomes a thread laid a thousand li ahead.

In Chapter 42 Xifeng asks Grannie Liu to name the girl. The reasoning is superstitious and exact: the child is sickly and highly born, and a poor person’s name will hold her down, will press the ill luck flat. Grannie Liu asks the birthday and is told the seventh day of the seventh month, the Double Seventh — an awkward day to be born on. Then call her Qiao, she says — 巧, “opportune”, “by happy chance”. 这叫作「以毒攻毒，以火攻火」的法子: this is the method of fighting poison with poison and fire with fire. She promises the girl will 逢凶化吉，遇难成祥 — meet calamity and turn it to good fortune. It is the only naming ceremony in the novel, and a beggar performs it.

Chapter 5 has already shown how it comes out. Her page in the Main Register carries a picture of a ruined village and a wayside inn, with a beautiful woman inside spinning thread. The verse:

势败休云贵，家亡莫论亲。 偶因济刘氏，巧得遇恩人。

When power collapses, say nothing of rank; when the house falls, speak nothing of kin. Because she once helped old Liu, by lucky chance — 巧 — she met her benefactor. Her song, 《留余庆》, “A Remnant of Blessing Left Behind”, names her enemies without naming them: 爱银钱、忘骨肉的狠舅奸兄 — the hard uncle and the crooked cousin, who love silver and forget blood.

They arrive on schedule. In Chapter 113, ill and frightened and haunted, Xifeng sends for Grannie Liu and puts her daughter into the countrywoman’s keeping. Xifeng dies in Chapter 114. Jia Lian is away settling his father’s affairs. In Chapter 118 — titled 记微嫌舅兄欺弱女, “nursing a petty grudge, uncle and cousin bully a defenceless girl” — Wang Ren, Qiaojie’s own maternal uncle, together with Jia Yun, Jia Huan and Jia Qiang, put her forward as a woman for a provincial prince’s household, and Lady Xing consents to it. In Chapter 119 Ping’er dresses her in the clothes of Grannie Liu’s granddaughter Qing’er and gets her out of the gate; Grannie Liu hides her at the farm until Jia Lian comes home. In Chapter 120 she is married into the Zhou family, prosperous country landowners, with Grannie Liu standing as go-between.

Twenty taels, handed over carelessly a hundred chapters earlier, buy a girl’s life. In a novel where every kindness is wasted and every debt goes unpaid, hers is the one account that balances.

The received ending does not quite match the prophecy. The register shows her poor, in a broken village, working a spinning wheel; Chapter 120 marries her comfortably into money. Many readers take the picture as evidence that in Cao Xueqin’s own plan she ended a farmer’s wife — and, on the strength of the swapped citron, Ban’er’s.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She paints her walking, not spinning. The girl stands in three-quarter view, moving across bare paper with nothing beneath her feet and nothing behind her. Her hair is cut in a straight child’s fringe across the brow and streams out behind in one broad grey-black sweep, the wettest and fastest stroke on the sheet. A red flower-shaped cap with a gold ornament sits on her head; blue bead earrings; the face small, wide-eyed, drawn in fine line over the palest flesh wash. The clothes are layered and loud — lilac silk flecked with white blossom, a teal cloak mottled in dark green, a sage skirt, a red girdle cord threaded through a green jade ring and trailing to the hem. Both hands are gone, swallowed by sleeves, and one sleeve flies out to the left as a pale empty wing. What she carries is the point: a large vermilion bundle, knotted at the top, patterned with rose-like whorls, held against her chest. That is a traveller’s pack. It says the road, and it says exile, without painting the house she left or the farm she reached.

The Calligraphy

巧姐, two characters set low on the left beneath the flung sleeve, the seal below them. The personal name alone, without the surname — not 贾巧姐, the form the genealogies use. And 姐 here is the affectionate suffix given to a girl, not the word for elder sister, so the painting addresses her as the household did in private, by the name Grannie Liu invented for her in Chapter 42.

Connections

• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — her mother, who entrusts her to Grannie Liu in Chapter 113 and dies in Chapter 114.
• Jia Lian 贾琏 — her father, absent from the house at the moment she is nearly sold.
• Grannie Liu 刘姥姥 — the countrywoman who names her in Chapter 42, hides her in Chapter 119, and makes her marriage in Chapter 120.
• Ping’er 平儿 — her father’s concubine, who disguises her as a peasant girl and gets her out of the gate.
• Wang Ren 王仁 — her maternal uncle, the 狠舅 of the Chapter 5 song, who offers her to a provincial prince.

Named on these pages Jia Lian 贾琏 · Jia Huan 贾环 · Liu Laolao 刘姥姥 · Wang Ren 王仁 · Ban'er 板儿

Dream of the Red Chamber
Xiang Li painted all 413 characters of the novel between 1975 and 1985, the first person to complete the entire cast. See the whole collection · Chinese Empresses